Episode 20 – Just another attempt at an interesting conversation

In which we try to define “competence” and identify where it’s necessary.
Recorded December 05, 2024.

Show notes and links:
We Don’t Talk About Bruno (From “Encanto”/Lyric Video)
The Noticer – Andy Andrews
The Best Summary of How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
Outliers (book) – Wikipedia
Dog Man | Dav Pilkey
The Far Side
Welcome to Doonesbury
Dr. Seuss | Biography, Books, Characters, Movies, & Facts | Britannica
Amadeus (1984) – IMDb
Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities
It’s Actually Pretty Easy to Get Ahead of 99% of People
Stephen Hawking biography: Theories, books & quotes | Space
About Dennis Prager

Transcript:

Jump to end
[clip] That’s okay, and competence and the choice to increase competence has to deal with focus.
You can’t focus on very many things at a time.
We talked about you’re doing a lot of things during a day and you’re gaining 10,000 hours
worth of competency in quite a number of things, 20 or 40 things.
But you can’t do that in 5,000 things.
You’ve got a limit of what you can actually focus on.
[introduction] Hey there.
This is our podcast, Do You Have a Minute?, in which my dad and I dive into deep discussions
about both the most profound and most mundane questions of life.
While we know we don’t have all the answers, probably none of them actually, we are opening
our minds to new perspectives and most importantly, we are having a good time in conversation.
Join us as we explore the unknown together.
[conversation] Hello.
Do you have a minute?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So I had a word I wrote on a paper.
Okay.
And now I picked a paper up.
The word says competence.
Oh, competence.
That’s a good word.
Competence.
So I don’t know, we could find out where it came from or what we know about it currently
and then identify what it might have of value.
All right.
Competence brings up a few things with me because there are perhaps some people that
are in my life or used to be in my life that aren’t in my life anymore because I didn’t
feel they were competent.
Competent enough to be friends?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I can think of at least one boyfriend when I was a teenager who was really
just an idiot.
Is idiocy an antonym of competent?
Which means meaning the same thing?
No, antonym opposite.
Antonym.
An opposite.
Well, synonyms the same thing.
Yes.
Well, why would it be opposite?
No, an idiot.
I would think they’re pretty competence.
Okay, competence and idiot.
Idiot savants are very competent.
Okay, but.
And their specific thing.
So you could be, you could be competent.
It’s just, if you can call someone an idiot, does that mean you’re telling them they have
no competence?
Hmm.
You know, idiot is an interesting word too, because I mean, now that we’ve said it three
or four times, it sounds like it’s not even a word.
What did it mean?
A stupid person, a person of low intelligence.
Incompetent.
So I would think incompetent would define those things.
That would probably be the same definition.
Okay.
Incompetence.
So.
Is the inability to make sound decisions.
So competent.
So competency is making sound decisions, the ability to make sound decisions.
And if someone is an idiot, then they’re not making sound decisions.
Not only that they’re not making them, they don’t have the ability to make them.
So maybe not.
Yeah, incompetence.
Let’s, let’s just go with that.
So this person was incompetent as well as an idiot, I guess.
Perhaps his capacity, his capacity to make sound decisions was much lower than mine.
We were not a good match.
Okay.
So the word capacity, and it’s not necessarily his capacity, his willingness, his desire.
Possibly due to his community, how he grew up and the people he hung out with.
We’ve talked in the past about being learning, being on an avenue to learn.
I think we were talking about disappointment.
That was, if you’re on an avenue to learn, you don’t have to be disappointed.
You’re just taking this next step as something to learn from.
So if you’re not on that avenue, if you’re of the avenue of being self-centered and poor
me or I don’t want to do anything, I’m just a mooch on society.
That person is incompetent.
Yeah.
They’re not making, not making decisions, whether they have the capacity to do it.
I think you use the word capacity.
Everyone has the capacity.
We all have the ability to do it.
Okay.
Even those who have limited, I want to say limited capacity, but I mean, that’s really
the nicest way of saying that they have what mental challenges, physical challenges that
prevent them.
Why would you be politically correct?
Say what you mean.
Because I don’t want to.
I don’t want to.
You don’t want to offend someone who perhaps is mentally challenged.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And legitimately mentally challenged, not…
Right.
And the word retarded in their mental abilities, we’re all retarded in some case.
Okay.
We’re held back by something.
But someone who has a retardation of their mental abilities so much that they don’t have
the capacity to be competent.
That’s what you’re saying.
There’s probably people in that realm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Children born from an alcoholic mother or from a drug addict mother or with only half
a brain.
I mean, there’s a lot of birth defects that can make it so that you can’t be competent
in most things.
So we’re not talking about those people, right?
Okay.
Right.
We’re talking about the 98% of society and maybe it’s 95%, maybe it’s 99.8%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don’t know.
What percent of us do actually have capacity to be competent and aren’t?
Well, and not necessarily and aren’t 98%.
Talking about competence.
And is competence related to that 98%?
Let’s just say it’s 98% and 2%.
Okay.
Is competence as judged by the 98% by the majority or the massive majority?
Is that how you judge competence?
That’s the threshold is whatever most people are, that’s what you determine whether someone
is competent or not.
Yeah.
Is there an average of competence based on the society you’re living in, the community
you’re a part of?
It has a general competence level.
To be a part of this community, you’ve got to have this certain level of competence.
We expect things of you.
There’s expectations, there’s desires.
You got to fit in a specific way with this group of people in this level of competence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Every community has a level of competence, an expectation of competence from their members.
I went to a community band concert last night and it was amazing.
They did so well.
It’s only their second year as a band, but they’re filled with people who played instruments
in college but didn’t have anywhere to go after that.
My city has its own community band and it’s very small, but then a new one popped up in
the other county and it’s really, really good.
I loved it.
There was a group of people that decided, we play and let’s just find out everyone else
who we know can find out who plays and see if we want to get together and create a club.
The director of the college here is the director of this community band.
He said during the concert, he was making announcements or whatever, talking about stuff.
He said, we have a waitlist for every instrument here.
Everyone wants to come and play with us.
It’s a large group and it’s going to be really successful and someday I’m going to play with
it.
I know it.
You’re going to apply, get your name on the list so that you can go to an audition for
the community band.
Yes.
I think it will be amazing.
It will be great.
All of those people, all of those musicians wouldn’t be there if they were not competent
in their playing.
I don’t think that they would have taken just any clarinetist that maybe could play.
Especially since there’s a wait list, they can, as a band, as a director or the presidency
of the band, can be choosy, selective of what competence level they want to accept in.
They can say, practice a little bit more.
Let’s give you these things and work on that.
Come back and try next year if you’d still like to.
We’d love to have you, but we need you to be at this level of competence if we’re going
to include you.
A band can do that, and it’s nice.
I guess that’s refreshing and odd that a community band, a community, any community project has
an excess of people.
Those things don’t happen.
Right.
Isn’t it amazing?
It’s hard to get people to be there.
You probably know you’re part of another band.
Do you have hard time recruiting volunteers to be a part of the band?
Yeah.
We’ve had years where we were barely meeting our minimum competition numbers, and this
year we have excess.
We have more than minimum numbers.
You can never have excess.
There’s no largest bagpipe band that you can have.
You don’t have a waiting list for your bagpipe.
No, we let everyone in.
You’re welcoming anybody in.
Yeah.
You don’t have a competence level.
You’ll say, you’re incompetent?
That’s great.
You’re developing your competence.
That’s the purpose of your band.
Your organization is to develop competence.
Even if you have no idea how to play drums, they’ll start you out and show you how to
play drums.
Right.
Now, we do have four levels of bands in the organization, so people will get sorted into
their competency level.
Competency levels inside the organization.
Okay.
Maybe that’s something the community band may do as well, get a JV, a JV community and
a varsity community.
Perhaps, yeah.
I’m in a choir in the community I’m in, and it has a hard time getting enough people to
come in and sing.
So consequently, that’s why they had me sing in the choir.
Yeah, that’s right.
There’s not that many people.
So they’ll take anyone who’s willing and there’s not enough willing people.
So that’s the…
This is rural area.
There’s not that many people here anyway, so it’s not a huge amount of people who used
to love to sing in college and they just want to keep singing in a choir.
I mean, it’s a great experience, it’s great, it’s fun, and it’s a good performance and
we do well, but it’d just be nice to have more people so that you could decide who’s
going to sing what parts instead of saying, you’re one of the five people, you’re singing
these parts.
Five or six people in each section.
I think in most communities, there is a competency expectation, right?
One community I can think of where you would accept someone regardless of their competency
is your family, right?
You wouldn’t kick someone out of your family because they’re incompetent.
The tier one nuclear family doesn’t kick people out based on competence.
Is that what you’re saying?
And maybe most tier two communities also don’t do that.
Well, I don’t know, I think they would.
There are laws against firing someone without cause, without reason.
There are employment laws, there’s things that have come into play to say you can’t
just at will gauge someone’s incompetent, you have to prove their incompetence if you’re
going to limit them from participating in your tier two activity.
And that’s even with a community band that have to justify the fact that they felt you’re
not competent.
You know, I’m not competent, you guys are discriminatory, I’m going to sue you.
Okay, so…
No, but to just society.
So yeah, I am wrong with that.
Most tier two communities could kick you out of their group because of incompetence in
some way or another.
Maybe I was just thinking of extended family.
You don’t kick an aunt out because she’s incompetent.
Your extended family, because it’s family, even though it extends into tier two, your
extended family would not have any problem with incompetent people.
I forget the name of the uncle that no one talked about in the…
Oh, I can’t remember the movie.
It won’t mention the movie, but you get people that people don’t talk about.
Yeah.
I’m reading…that makes me think of…I’m reading Les Miserables with my kid.
Okay.
All right.
She’s got to read it with me because otherwise it would be completely…she’s not competent
enough to understand the language, you know, how Hugo wrote, you know?
And so the first book is all about this bishop, who which comes into play later in the story,
but we’re at chapter eight.
And we were introduced to the bishop’s sister in chapter one.
She’s a very important person to him.
Finally in chapter eight, we find out he’s got two brothers.
And that’s interesting.
That’s interesting that Victor Hugo would wait so long to introduce his two brothers,
but it’s really just illustrative of the kind of person this bishop is.
That’s the whole point of the book anyway, is telling us, building his character, you
know?
So that, for some reason, that made me think of that.
His sister is closer to him than his brothers are, apparently.
Yes.
Well, she lives with him too.
But these two brothers, so far in the chapter, they’re not incompetent.
I think maybe he disagrees with one of them because he’s a politician.
But other than that, it’s, yeah, mildly related to what we’re talking about.
Carry on.
Okay.
So you might not, well, you wouldn’t, you would not talk to someone who you feel is
incompetent.
I mean, if you have a cousin that just is shallow and never talks about anything but
football, you’re not going to talk to them very long.
You know, they’re a Rams fan and Rams fans are weird.
In that respect, anyone who has a specific thing, so he’s competent, let’s just say it’s
a Rams fan.
Competent in Rams football and wherever Rams are playing now, where are they playing?
Do you happen to know the city?
I am incompetent in Rams football.
Right.
I don’t know.
Los Angeles, Rams it used to be, maybe it still is LA, wherever they are.
So but he’s got full competence there.
He knows all the players and their coaches and the manager of the team and the owners
and knows who they are and what they do and how they made their money.
You know, is there anything about it?
Full competence in that realm.
But he’s not someone that anyone else can talk to because that is he wears Rams on his
shirt sleeves.
Like we talked in the past about someone who wears religion on their shirt sleeves.
They’re fully competent in that religious scheme, but everything is about that.
And everything’s about the Rams.
Everything’s about what you’re what you have your competence in.
It’s kind of like the personality tests, red, yellow, white, blue personalities.
And you’re competent in certain things and you just have no relation to compassion or
to empathy.
Yeah.
Those are easy things for people to drop.
Right.
And just not be part of the five love languages, which is supposed to be really helpful.
But once you find out that you’re not competent in speaking your partner’s love language,
then it becomes a fight for years.
Well, and so you’ve got to identify.
That’s why we’re talking about competence is you can identify where you are.
Is that where you will be?
Okay.
And it gives you an opportunity to recognize what more you could be doing.
So what’s your goal in relation to personality tests and love languages?
For the color code, your goal is to be a rainbow color code that you can be a director when
it’s time to be a director.
You can be red when it’s time to be red and yellow when it’s time to be yellow.
If you feel like you have no characteristics at all of a leader, of a director, of a manager,
you have to develop those.
You have the opportunity to develop that competence.
And should you?
So that’s…should you try to develop competence?
I think so.
I think across the board, universally, everyone should be trying to develop competence in
whatever their…wherever their values are, wherever their priorities are, their deeply
held beliefs.
Deeply held beliefs are easy to develop competence in because that’s who you are.
What about your shallowly held beliefs?
The beliefs that…in that Noticer book where it says, what would people change about
you if they could?
So you’re identifying that there’s something that someone has a concern about, question
about.
If you don’t mind me going off on another tangent, there’s another thing I was thinking
about just yesterday.
I was talking to someone and they were asking if they should change so that their partner
is happy, happier with them, if they should be the one to change.
And I told them that they should only change if there’s things about themselves that they
don’t like.
They shouldn’t change for the sake of someone else, I think.
And this is what I thought yesterday.
Maybe you can convince me otherwise because the look on your face is suggesting that I’m
wrong, but…
Where is your center?
Where is your center in that response?
What do you mean?
Where is the center?
Your focus?
Focus yourself.
On yourself.
Your focus on yourself.
And we’ve talked about self-focus when you start self-focusing on you’re the center of
the university.
I’ll change if I feel like it.
I’m the one that’s the most important.
I’m going to make my decisions.
I’m not going to listen to you.
And they’re not necessarily saying it that way, but that tends to misery.
Self-centeredness.
So others centeredness.
If you’re going to be centered on someone else and you care about them, and we’ve talked
about this with other things, I think.
But if you care about someone, you want to please them or help them, you still want to
have a relationship with them.
You want to build a relationship.
That relationship has to do with doing things the way they want it done.
If you want a relationship with them.
Yes.
So let’s say you have a habit of picking your nose and they don’t like it at all.
And I think the only reason that you should change it is if you also don’t like it.
I mean, you want to stay with this person and perhaps you can convince yourself that
you don’t like picking your nose.
You don’t like that you do that because when you do that, it upsets your partner.
And so then that’s the reason that you should change is because you don’t like that you
do that.
You don’t like that because I still want to do this, but I’m not going to because he doesn’t
want me to do it.
Right.
I agree with you in regard to the motivation of it.
The motivation has to be framed that way.
You can’t change someone else.
Your partner can’t change you based on their desires.
So they can’t desire to change you.
And so now you’re going to change.
That’s just that’s easy.
It’s that statement, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
So your will has to make the change.
So yeah, unless you want to.
So the way you said it, the way you said it was kind of a defiant way as I’m not going
to change unless I am your answer.
Don’t change unless you feel like change.
Let’s see if I actually said it, but don’t the thing is the thing is don’t change until
not not unless but until you feel like changing and really the modification that you can’t
change until you feel like changing.
So if you want to change for them, it’s never going to work.
You can’t change for them.
You can’t change until you feel like changing, till it’s your motivation internally.
So I’ve been dealing with that.
You know, I get with that all the time.
But right now, let me give you this.
Did I tell you about the milk I’m drinking now?
The mayo milk.
You told me about the mayo milk.
You tried making milk out of mayonnaise.
I tried mayonnaise milk.
Yeah, I tried mayonnaise.
I tried yogurt.
So I’ve tried a few things to make milk out of it.
No, this this stuff works.
And I I’m sure I told you, you know, messed up.
But instead of instead of cow’s milk or goat milk or any what?
Milk product.
Okay, animal milk.
So it’s it’s macadamia.
Yeah, macadamia nut milk.
And what is it?
Coconut milk, coconut cream milk.
It’s the coconut cream in the cans is thick.
The thickness of the coconut cream added to the macadamia milk in a proportion.
And I’m getting the proportions down right there.
It’s amazing.
It’s got exactly the same texture of milk and it has a fairly good aftertaste.
Does it taste like milk?
Yeah.
Well, no, it doesn’t taste like it tastes like coconut when it’s done.
So it’s kind of like drinking a pina colada.
Okay.
I haven’t tried putting pineapple in.
Maybe you should try putting pineapple in and see how that works.
Yeah, that’ll give it a little bit of tanginess that you get when the milk starts to go
Sour.
Yeah.
Right.
So what when I started it, milk has 12 grams of sugar in it.
And this macadamia milk and coconut milk have zero sugar.
So it tasted weird that way.
So I am adding sugar.
So I add the 12 grams of sugar, supposedly.
Maybe I’m adding more, but I’ll get the taste right.
You got to weigh your sugar in on a scale.
Make sure that’s exactly 12 grams.
Right.
So we’ll feed that, but I’m working on that.
And I’ve been told, and well, I took food sensitivity, that I’m sensitive to milk.
And I’m not going to change because some doctor or sensitivity test tells me, you know, I
love drinking milk.
I’m going to drink milk.
We’ve talked about this before.
It’s something I’m not going to give up.
Yes.
Right.
Ever.
Who cares?
I don’t feel bad.
If it makes my insides not work right, cool.
I can live with that.
But I decided maybe there is an alternative, and if there’s an alternative that I can be
comfortable with, and I’m excited about this comfort level of macadamia milk.
And maybe we can change it to walnut milk, too.
Walnut, I’ll find some of the other nuts that I’m not sensitive to.
Almond milk is proliferous out there everywhere, but I’m a little more sensitive to almonds
than the other nuts.
So macadamias and walnuts are good.
So we’ve seen walnut milk.
I’ll come and try some of that, see if I can mix it.
Coconuts are fine.
So those things I have a low sensitivity to.
It says it’s healthy for me.
Okay.
Works well.
And I made it work.
I tried it with cereal yesterday, and the cereal tastes just fine with this milk in
it.
So there was no difference.
I mixed my drink mix, my protein drink mix with it, and I can’t tell that it’s not milk.
And the base of that, the taste still comes through just fine.
I did notice chocolate milk.
I tried to mix chocolate milk, and chocolate doesn’t work.
You can’t put chocolate in.
I’ll have to figure out how to make chocolate milk.
What about carob?
Have you put carob in it?
No, I haven’t tried carob.
You should try that.
Maybe I could try carob.
That’ll be something to try.
But seeing there’s an excitement.
There’s a willingness on my side to figure it out.
And so I don’t have to be badgered by my partner saying, you’re drinking too much milk.
Stop buying.
No, don’t do that anymore.
I just stopped buying it.
I’m using this.
I’m starting to work out this.
And this will cost at least twice as much as a gallon of milk.
I was going to ask about that.
It’s going to be more expensive.
That was my next question was, how does it compare to cost?
Milk is like what?
It’s $4.50?
It’s $4.00 a quart for the macadamia.
So that’s four times as much for the macadamia itself.
Yeah, just for the macadamia.
And then you add the coconut milk.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what the cost is, but the cost isn’t the important thing.
Do you think the cost of it will help you drink less?
Or are you going to drink five gallons a week no matter what?
No.
You don’t drink five gallons a week for sure.
Probably maximum two gallons.
I drink two or three.
And actually I’m drinking a half gallon a day still.
So I still drink four gallons a week.
So still a half gallon of what I’m mixing.
Do you know how much protein you’re getting if you drink half a gallon a day?
I’ve been really focused on my protein intake.
And half a gallon of milk a day would really cover all of my protein needs, I think.
That’s why I was really happy when I had the cow and milking the cow and drinking cow’s
milk all day long.
I didn’t have to worry about protein intake or energy.
I could live on cow’s milk.
A human can live on cow’s milk.
We talked about that.
You need peanut butter as well, I think.
Or honey or beer.
Okay.
Something else.
Some, what do you call those?
Flax?
Some fiber.
You need fiber.
You need some fiber.
Yes.
Fiber, protein, carbohydrates.
Milk gives you all the fat you need too.
Okay.
So we were talking about gaining the competence.
So I’m gaining the competence in milk production.
I used to milk a cow and produce milk that way.
And now I’m milking cans and bottles and creating milk.
You’re milking macadamia nuts and coconuts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it’s a completely new milk supply, but it’s something that I can use.
I can drink it.
It works.
I would bet you have the equipment in your kitchen to be able to make your own macadamia
milk.
You could probably get the cost down to just twice as much as cow milk instead of four
times as much.
Well, macadamia nuts, I mean, they’re $8 or $10 for a one pound box.
You’d have to buy them bulk from the source probably.
By themselves.
You could grow them.
Do you think they grow in your area?
Oh, no, they don’t.
We don’t live in Hawaii.
We could probably put them in the greenhouse though.
We’ve tried growing a macadamia trees in the greenhouse.
Okay.
Yeah.
If we heat the greenhouse and keep it going all the time.
Man, that would drive up costs.
But I don’t think I need to try that.
Then I could sell macadamia milk around this community instead of cow’s milk.
There you go.
People would be shocked.
Yeah.
Here, this is my new milk substitute.
It’s great.
Gaining a competence in that.
We talked about you’ve got to have your own motivation.
So that’s what got us onto that discussion.
I had to get my own motivation.
Someone else telling me that I’m sensitive to this doesn’t matter.
I’ve got to get my own motivation, my own reasons, and have the willingness to test
things out, to try them, to try to replace it, try to change it.
And I’m having the time of my life changing it.
Yeah.
You’re happy to change in this way.
Yeah.
Happy to change.
And I think you’ve got to be happy to change if you’re going to change anything.
Yeah, motivation, if you’re not happy, you’re not motivated for it.
So you’ve got to be motivated to it.
Just like understanding.
Let me read to you what I said, what I actually said so that maybe you can think better about
how I said it.
Oh yeah, your text back.
It said, if you change anything, change because you don’t like that about yourself.
Don’t change because they’ll be mad if you don’t.
Same for them.
Anything they change needs to be because they don’t like that.
They don’t like that they’re like that.
You can’t make other people change just because you want them to change.
I thought that I said it basically the best way that I could.
Yeah.
Can you say it better?
Think of a better way to say it.
So challenge yourself just right now with that text.
What could you have said differently than that that would have been better?
You’ve got to be able to improve.
Something that includes happy, be happy to change.
You can’t change unless you believe in the change.
So you said you use the word don’t like in there.
That was how you were framing it.
Your basis was something you don’t like.
They don’t like it.
You’ve got to not like it in order to change it.
So they’d be happier.
So if you just change the phrasing of happiness, they’d be happier if you changed it.
And if you want to be happier with them, you’ve got to be happy to change it.
If you’re not happy to change it, the changing it wouldn’t make you happier.
You’re not going to be motivated to change it.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think finding a positive way to say it instead of using negative language.
I believe in that, yes.
And I forgot what word I used that caused you to say I want to use the words because
I didn’t mean it derogatorily or demeaning.
I forgot the word.
I think it starts with a D, maybe offensively.
Whatever it was.
I don’t know.
It was a bad way and you want to be more positive about it.
To be more positive about it using positive words, you’re gearing towards your happiness
if you can identify that there’s a happy outcome.
So what causes motivation?
Motivation to become competent.
To gain competence.
What motivates you to gain competence?
Because competence takes work.
Competence takes work?
Right.
Does it always take work or sometimes does it just fall on you?
Let’s see.
Like your curly hair, for instance, does it just fall on you or does it take work?
It takes work.
I had to learn how to manage it.
Even though it’s naturally curly, it does take work to be competent in managing it.
Yes.
It wouldn’t.
And my hairdo, it takes work.
I’ve got to cut it more often than I do.
More often than you used to.
Which I don’t cut it often enough.
And it’s because it’s way too long right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Somehow I’ve got to manage it.
And I’m incompetent in managing my haircuts.
Are there any examples of, well, I mean, so you’re incompetent in managing your haircuts
and so mom has to manage them for you, right?
Right.
And now she’s refused to manage them for me and she says, just look like an idiot if you
want.
Look like an incompetent idiot.
That’s where that phrase comes back in too.
Go ahead.
I don’t care anymore.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
So are there, can we think of any examples where you don’t have to work to gain competency
in something?
Breathing probably.
You’re just good at that.
We’re all competent breathers.
That’s the automatic systems in the body.
However, there are some issues around mouth breathing.
You’ve got to be competently breathing through your nose and keeping your mouth shut while
you sleep at night and things like that.
Like there’s a certain level of breathing that everyone should be reaching for.
There are things you can gain competence even in non-competent required tasks like that,
like breathing.
Everyone’s going to breathe.
If you’re alive, you’re going to breathe and you don’t have to do it any specific way.
You could do it just how your body makes you do it and you can make a lot of noise when
you do it and it will not ruin the breathing.
But you can gain more competence in your breathing.
There’s forms of breathing, two breaths in and one out and four second and eight second.
You can breathe with your stomach and not your chest.
So there’s all kinds of things to focus on if you want to.
So the base level of breathing requires almost no effort at all.
And maybe the base level of anything.
And then you wouldn’t say that someone is incompetent at their breathing because they don’t know
the breathing practices or rituals or whatever, breathing styles.
Maybe you would say they’re ignorant but not incompetent.
But they’re competent to the level they are.
But if you’re talking to someone who’s studied and who’s focusing on the breathing, maybe
even in the professions, training people how to breathe or how to breathe again after they
take a lung machine off or whatever, you know, the doctors, they’ll have levels of competence
in breathing studies.
But the common person is commonly competent.
So there’s a common competence.
Maybe that’s it that you don’t have to practice for.
You don’t have to work for the common competence.
When we gain use of our fingers, we’re all competent using our fingers, but we can’t
twirl a pen.
Do you know that trick?
People will hold a pen like this and then flip it around their thumb.
Yeah.
Do you know that one?
Yeah, I’ve seen that.
Have you ever done it?
Nope.
I’ve seen people do it, but I’ve never learned how to do it.
I just tried and I dropped my pen.
Where did it go?
Right.
Right.
My pen’s on the ground too.
So you’re holding a pen like you’re writing it and then you flip it with your finger,
with your middle finger, you flip it around your thumb and grab it with your pointer finger.
Okay.
Yes.
I’ve seen videos of that.
So that’s the description of it.
And it’s easy.
People who do it, they can do it and they continue to do it.
Just flip it right around and they’ll grab it.
And it’s easy for them because they’re competent.
We all have competence in how we use our hands, but we don’t have competence with the specific
things.
Or like a magician who can palm a quarter or a dollar or a dime.
Right.
So you have to work hard to be able to do that.
Yeah.
To gain confidence of dexterity with your fingers.
But we’re all common competent with our fingers.
So literally everything that we do has a competency level.
You can be better at everything that you do, but most things that we do, our competency
is adequate.
If it’s adequate for the community you’re in, maybe there’s no reason to extend it.
Right.
Yeah.
Everyone can learn to play the banjo with fingering techniques, but unless you’re wanting to be
in a community that that’s going to be an important competence to hold.
Or like violin playing.
I was thinking about that the other day too, is getting the vibrato on the left hand on
the violin.
And so I worked with a little bit last week, but I’ve been working with it for 10 years
and I haven’t done it yet.
Haven’t gotten there, but I got the tips from the people who said, this is how you train
that skill, that level of competence so that you can vibrato a violin.
And one of these days maybe I’ll have it.
It’ll speed up so that I can actually vibrato.
I mean, I can move my hand the direction they tell you to move it, but it’s not.
It doesn’t sound anything like it is meant to.
No.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
I’m not competent to try it even on a violin fret.
In front of anyone.
Right.
Yeah.
So don’t ask me.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
So what was I, let’s move to where I got this word from.
This is how to read a book by Mortimer Adler.
So I’m reading how to read a book and why that you have to read that book with your
daughter because the language that was used in France and that they translate it from
is different than we speak today.
And so you’ve got to discussing that.
I had to decode the sentences, figure out what they’re actually trying to say.
I suggested we read the Cliff Notes version of it.
And she said, what’s that?
I had to decode that too.
Cliff Notes don’t exist.
And actually Cliff Notes now, no one has those.
You got online reviews.
There’s other things.
The Cliff Notes still exists, but it’s certainly not in book form.
I mean, everything we have is online.
You’re going to look for a review, a quick review of a book.
And that’s what this, this how to read a book was written in 1940 by Mortimer Adler and
then redone in 1973, I think, 77.
So he wrote it again.
They published this one 72, but still 72 is 50 years ago.
Yeah.
That’s a long time ago when books were the only thing in the seventies, early seventies
TV was barely starting.
You didn’t have internet.
You had no online anything.
There was no digital anything.
It was all paper.
And so reading a book was the only thing to do.
Now reading a book is still important and it’s still the same process, but it’s, it’s
augmented to what we’re currently doing.
AI can read the book for you and give you an AI synopsis in 10 sentences.
Right.
Right.
And so maybe that’s the Cliff Notes of today.
Is AI summaries?
Just log onto AI and say, summarize Les Miserables for me.
And I’ll give you 20 sentences.
Use 20 sentences, summarize Les Miserables.
They’d probably do it.
Yeah.
Just fine.
Within three seconds, it would have it back for you.
The statement here is we, we must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing
that the only, all that the word competent implies, nothing less will satisfy the need
of the word that the world, of the world that is coming.
Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.
So this is in the seventies.
He was thinking about the future.
Okay.
And we’re in that future.
We’re, we’re way past what I think he was even thinking about with AI models and what
they can do now, what we’re, what we’re actually working on.
But we still have to be truly competent readers with all, that was the question with all the
competence requires.
That’s why I wanted to talk about this.
All that the word competent implies.
So what is implied by the word competent?
Yeah.
Ability to understand and speak and like fluency.
Fluency could be competent.
If you’re a fluent reader, you could be a fluent reader of Dogman, but that’s, that’s
not going to help you.
Like does he, in the, in this book, does he lay out standards for lowest level of reading
someone should have?
Yeah, actually reading is divided into two different things.
The levels of reading you’ve got elementary reading for Dogman.
Okay.
Just understanding fourth grade language.
So there’s, there’s fourth grade reading and then 10th grade reading and then college level
reading.
So there’s three, three different, that’s kind of stages, but the levels of reading
are elementary, then inspectional, analytical, and then syntopical.
And syntopical reading is the way I’ve always described reading.
That’s what I’ve been talking about for years.
I didn’t know the name of it, but it’s syntopical.
It’s saying that you’re going to look for the same thread in six or eight or 10 books.
Right.
And you’re going to match them together and you’re going to merge that and think about
what they’re saying against each other, each other and for each other.
And so you’re going to merge that, that idea and that’s syntopical.
Analytical reading is, is getting into what you actually think if what they’re saying
is true and if it’s not true and then what it means to you, what it means to you, what
they just told you, whether it’s true or not.
Inspection, inspectional reading, you’re just looking to find out what’s in the book, what
it says.
Okay.
So doing that.
And actually it’s not even what it says.
That’s done.
There’s, there’s a lot more to reading and it, and it’s all designed here in the program.
I was surprised how in depth the program is for how to read a book.
Yeah.
I mean, that’s, that book you’re holding is, is not a thin book.
It’s probably a few hundred pages, right?
Yeah, that’s probably 200, 420.
Okay.
400 pages.
And skimming the book, I mean, reading a book, I’ve always done that too.
You skim the book first.
You look at the table of contents to see if it’s even worth reading.
And if you’ve read a book, you can read a book without even cracking into it or inspecting
it.
You can reserve inspection.
Maybe you can determine that Dog Man is not a book that you really want to get into, but
maybe like the Far Side, the Far Side comics, right?
There are books of the Far Side.
Maybe that’s a book to get into because they wrote that or Doonesbury who was, you know,
political cartoonists.
They they’re displaying messages with their words.
They’re not just doing what Dog Man’s doing.
I don’t know, maybe Dog Man has a has a theme.
Does it?
I have noticed the the general plot lines in these books kind of follow classic literature.
It just touches on it, though.
It’s not exactly the plot, you know?
So you can gain.
I mean, it’s not that there’s nothing to gain from a comic style book.
Dr. Seuss literature is literature.
Dr. Seuss has important things to say and their important morals and probably every
one of his stories that you can think about.
And he says, then when you get the analytical reading, it’s not how fast you read that’s
important.
It’s how much you can get out of it.
And you might spend a week with it with a Dr. Seuss novel or novel story.
Yeah.
And touching kind of like our conversation here.
We’re just talking about one word and we can go anywhere with it.
Right.
You can take it anywhere.
OK.
So becoming a competent reader, does he have his own definition of what competent means
in there or is that where he and he leaves it up to his readers interpretation?
Yeah, that that statement.
That’s the only time he used the word competent is is in the first part there.
It’s another word that he said.
We have to be active or demanding, active or demanding readers.
So the next the next chapter is an active and demanding, a demanding reader is a competent
reader.
You’ve got to demand something of the books you’re you’re getting to.
So competence, he said, is is upfront, all that implies.
So that in his book, you’re supposed to just have your own understanding of what competence
is and apply it to reading.
OK.
So I could say I’m a competent reader at the level that I’m at right now and then just
be happy with that.
And most people are happy with that.
Yeah.
And and really, that’s we talk about the fourth grade written in fourth grade reading, fourth
grade language.
Yeah.
Fourth grade language is just understanding of vocabulary to get by and to do everything.
So that fourth grade, that’s the first elementary reading level that people get to.
And he says that’s where most people stop.
You just you don’t go beyond that.
You don’t go into inspectional or analytical and definitely not syntopical.
Right.
So you would be willing to think a lot to go to the syntopical concept.
And then you’ve got 10th grade reading that most people don’t get to that they should.
We should all get to a 10th level, 10th grade reading style.
And that’s more inspectional and more analytical that you can read, read Les Miserables and
discuss it or read the Iliad, the Homer’s works to and understand them.
Yeah.
And it takes a 10th grade level of understanding and analysis ability in order to do that.
The fourth grade vocabulary and reading, most people understand that.
And that’s why people talk that way.
That’s why the news is written in that level.
Yeah.
Even I bet even the Wall Street Journal is that is written in fourth grade.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s fourth grade.
They don’t write any of those.
The what?
The Atlantic or The Economist.
Those magazines probably that are in a 10th grade level.
Scientific journals clearly are 10th grade levels.
And maybe some of them, even the scientific journals are in the college level because
you can’t talk about things in that realm unless you’re using all of the words and all
of the ideas.
Right.
Yeah.
So, it’s an interesting book.
So the competence though, the competence of the country is still is generally everyone’s
on a fourth grade level.
There’s few people that are illiterate nowadays.
So very few unlettered people completely.
They can’t read anything.
So we’ve gotten the level of competence in the country.
There’s a level even like the naturalized citizen.
If you’re gonna be a citizen in the United States, you need to understand English to
a certain degree and be competent to that level of understanding road markers.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you can’t, you could probably live here and perhaps be a citizen, but still not be
able to get your driver’s license.
You have to be competent enough to understand those for your license.
I’ve never looked into the naturalization laws.
So what do you know about them?
I think there are tests of English, of understanding the language well enough to get by the fourth
grade language vocabulary ability.
Yeah.
I mean, that is our country’s official language, even though what they say most people that
live in America don’t speak English as their native language, their first language.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Yeah.
I think.
But if you want to be a US citizen, you’ve got to have, and I don’t know, I haven’t looked
into the naturalization requirements lately either on what it takes.
But I would think that that’s part of it.
You would hope.
You would hope that that’s part of it.
I would hope it is.
What’s the other thing about competence?
So what would happen, what do you imagine would happen in Mortimer Adler’s future if
people weren’t competent readers?
Is that happening now?
We don’t have, I mean, the majority of people aren’t competent readers at a 10th grade level.
Right.
And I think that’s where you run into people.
Like we’ve got a relative who said, I don’t like your conversations because they’re just
over my head.
Yeah.
You live in that world.
And he’s not a dumb guy.
I’m surprised.
It’s intelligent.
He knows what he’s doing, but he says, I don’t want to think that hard about listening to
a podcast or radio program or anything.
He listens to music and loves music.
And you get people that just love music and you love a light, funny type thing.
I can enjoy Seinfeld or something funny, but I can’t enjoy something that’s going to cause
me to analyze anything or make me think.
I don’t want to think.
I don’t want to have to think.
Yeah.
For some reason that hurts people’s brains to have to think hard.
They get headaches.
And why?
So.
It’s probably the way they’re holding their eyebrows while they’re trying to think.
You know, there’s all of the stress around their skull.
Because they have to get that attitude of thinking.
Yeah.
And maybe it’s the pointing to their temple all the time that causes the headaches.
I had a new thought.
Poking themselves in the head.
Could be anything.
But I think people are happy to just skate by life, to scale, skate.
What else do you call it?
Float down the river of life instead of swimming down.
Instead of paddling.
Instead of getting a paddle or using a motor or doing anything else.
You’re just floating through life.
They’re the mooching side.
If someone’s going to do something for me, I’m going to let them.
It’s just fine.
I don’t need to clean my sidewalk.
They’ll come up and clean it.
If the neighbors want it clean, they’ll clean it.
I’m not going to shovel my walk.
Okay.
Yeah.
Definitely not going to shovel anyone else’s walk.
Yeah.
I mean, they’re stupid coming over to shovel my walk.
But you know, the snow.
If it snows.
And I’ve done that before.
I’ve been in a home that I just didn’t want to shovel the sidewalk.
So I walked over the snow all winter.
It was okay with me.
You know, you make your path through it and it gets more and you just build the path up.
So you walk higher.
You don’t have to shovel everything you walk on.
It’s just for the safety of people that walk past your house.
I think I have to shovel.
I feel a responsibility to shovel my walks because if I didn’t, then the school kids
who walk past will slip and fall.
And they’re probably going to…
I mean, I believe it’s written in the city code that the walks in front of your house
have to be cleared.
They’re your responsibility as the homeowner.
You’ve got to salt them.
And especially where on the hill, you don’t want any ice to cause someone to crack their
skull on your driveway.
Yeah.
Even though that would make a hilarious video.
Watching everybody slide down the hill on my sidewalk.
Well, hilarious or bloody, one or the other.
People would watch it regardless of whether there’s blood or not.
Right.
Right.
And I’m sure you’ll have cars slide down and that’s probably going to be just as fun watching
the icy roads at some point.
So that’s why you gotta make sure that you get your cars up off the street so that anyone
else comes by doesn’t run into yours.
Yes.
I had my mailbox post set into the concrete about a foot, foot and a half maybe.
Yeah.
So that when someone hits it with their car, it won’t get dislodged.
It’ll be there.
And is it metal?
No, it’s a six inch wood post.
Six inch square.
Okay.
Well, it might survive, but I think it’s right next to the telephone pole too, right?
I mean, you’re pretty close to the telephone pole.
So they’re going to hit that in the telephone pole.
Hopefully they’ll hit the telephone pole before your mailbox and it stops them.
They’ve already hit the telephone pole.
So that’s already been hit.
They had to redo all the wires because of that last year.
Oh, wow.
So people enjoy their level of competence too.
You’d get to a level that you say, I’m adequate.
We talked about that a little bit.
I’m adequate for what I’m doing.
And I do that too.
In music, I’m a musician, but I’m no musician.
I play the organ.
But the only reason, and I tell people this, the only reason I can play the organ is because
I don’t care if I make mistakes.
I’m okay.
I’m okay with the level of competence I’m at.
I’m not trying to be the paid for organist that earns his money or has to compete for
the position.
I’m not going to compete for any playing position.
Right.
Right.
So you can be happy with where you’re at.
I don’t like being at a mediocre level in basically anything that I’m trying to gain
a higher competency in.
I don’t want to be mediocre.
So my level of adequacy is a little bit higher than that.
I think, I don’t know, I mean, we’d have to take it like specifically this hobby or that
hobby or that task or whatever.
But…
As to whether you would do it in public.
Right.
Right.
Whether I would do this in public or not.
So where was I going?
The adequacy mediocrity.
However, if it feels like I’m at a plateau where I’m not getting any better at something,
then maybe I would change my thinking about it and be like, you know what, this is good
enough.
I thought that I wanted to be better at this, but actually, mediocrity is an okay place
to be in this thing.
You know, in mediocrity, the most famous statement of that is Salieri with Mozart in my mind.
Anyway, in Mozart where Salieri said, mediocrities of the world, I salute you.
Because he was trying, he was the court composer.
He was trying to be the best that he could be.
And at best, at his best, he was mediocre in relation to Mozart.
Right.
You know, when you have excellence there and genius, you’re not going to be able to, even
with all your study and all your work, his whole life work.
But at the beginning of that movie, he’s playing pieces and he says, and then he starts playing
something else.
And he says, you’ve heard this, this is this, I made this and I created this, you know,
using the old folks home.
And he says, maybe you’ve heard this.
And he plays a piece.
Oh yeah, I heard that.
I know that.
He says, that’s Mozart.
That’s Mozart.
That’s not mine.
Yeah.
You never heard anything that the court composer, that the professional did, but you know all
the stuff that this genius did.
Right.
The natural competence.
And so that, you know, competence, Mozart had a talent.
Michael Jordan, they talk about, he had a, what, the innate ability, what do you call
it in basketball?
He was an innate ability to play basketball, a talent for it, whatever it is.
Here’s another word I don’t recall.
But even though you have, predisposition, even though you have the talent for it, full
basketball talent and common sense, you’re not going to hit the level that Michael Jordan
hit unless you practice 10 hours a day every day.
So you still have to work at it.
Usain Bolt, and I was impressed by this, it was probably 10 years ago when he was running
or eight or six, I don’t know when he was running.
But when he took over and he beat the whole field by yards in a hundred yard dash, the
documentary on his life showed how much he practiced.
He was practicing eight or 10 hours a day and running and pushing himself.
And he didn’t just have that natural ability, natural talent.
He had that, but you work on it to gain world class, gain full competence.
So and maybe that world class competence, Michael Jordan, Mozart, Usain Bolt, they gained
world class competence.
They’re world known, world renowned for their competence.
And other people maybe just are happy that they won their race this week.
Yeah.
There’s a certain level of innate ability that you need to have, but then to become
anything, like once you have that, to become anything more than mediocre, you need to put
in the hard work.
What is that fake statistic that they say?
There’s successes, 10% talent and 90% hard work or something like that, whatever it is.
It’s illuminating.
It’s yeah, you have a little bit of talent, but that’s not going to get you anywhere.
It’ll help, but it’s not going to do the work for you.
Yeah.
And yeah, you’ve got to keep working at it and you don’t necessarily go straight up.
I mean, that’s why whatever you reach plateau is that you can’t seem to expand beyond.
You know, I’m working on a plateau, but you have to keep working through that plateau
period so that you can get to the next, the next progress where you say, I don’t seem
to be getting any better.
I’m practicing, working on this, the broad old thing, and I can’t get any better with
it.
Well, that’s just because you’re on a plateau for four years.
Get off that plateau.
If you work on it enough, you’ll get off the plateau and actually move to something that
you can use.
Yeah.
But you gotta keep working through the timeframe, that 10,000 hours.
Jim Collins or who was it that came up with that?
Was it Jim?
10,000 hours of competence.
Wasn’t there some-
Mastery.
Will Buffett.
What is his name?
Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett.
Wasn’t that a Warren Buffett thing talking to his airline pilot?
No, he was, yeah, that’s not 10,000 hours.
That’s what you’re going to prioritize.
That’s prioritizing things.
So what are the 25 things you’re going to do?
And then identify the top thing and maybe order the top five.
You know, these are the ones you’re going to work on this year.
What are you going to do with the other 20 things?
Absolutely nothing.
Yeah.
I don’t care about those anymore.
You let go of those.
And there’s another thing, this Alex Hormozi, he’s the one I sent you that video.
The CEO talking about what you focus on.
Yes, I’m remembering this.
He’s got curly hair, he’s got a big afro type hairdo.
Okay.
But he’s talking business.
He says, you need to pick your focus, focus on one thing.
And then everything else, you let those fires burn.
You don’t even pay attention to them.
Any other fires or problems you have in your organization, the one thing that’s important,
do that.
Do that one thing, get it done and put everyone’s work on it and let every other fire burn.
By the time you’ve solved that, chances are these other fires will become irrelevant.
You won’t even worry about them because you’ve solved the big thing, the important thing.
So you take that was Warren Buffett’s thing.
So that’s a completely different line of thought.
Okay.
10,000 hours.
Where did that come from?
10,000 hours is excellent.
I think it is Jim Collins on in his book.
What was the book?
His primary one, the main one?
Good to Great?
Good to Great.
Is it Good to Great?
Yeah, Good to Great.
It takes 10,000 hours to get to mastery.
I think that’s what it was.
And 10,000 hours is eight hours a day for 10 years, for five years.
Is it five years?
Eight hours a day times…
20 times 12, 1900 a year.
So that’s five years.
Yeah.
Okay.
2000 hours a year, roughly 2000 hours a year.
So five years full time on something and you’ve got 10,000 hours.
But what the next logical point to that with competency, you’re developing competence with
that 10,000 hours.
You got to do many of those in succession.
So you’re not just going to get competent at one thing.
You’re not going to become an organ player and learn the organ and you’re going to do
10,000 hours on organ playing.
And that’s all you do that year.
You’re doing that while you’re eating and while you’re building a milk replacer and
while you’re exercising and you’re building in a greenhouse and learning all that.
You’re doing 10,000, 10 or 20, 10,000 hours at the same time.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so the focus, the time that you’re focusing on that project that…
I hate time blocking, but it’s kind of a time blocking thing.
Our conversation here, the only thing we’re doing in this hour or so is talking and thinking.
Yeah.
That’s it.
And this is part of the 10,000 hours.
And if we do this one hour a week, when are we going to get excellence at this?
One hour a week.
It’s going to be years.
Yeah.
52 hours a year.
So what’s 10,000 divided by 52?
192 years.
200 years.
192 years is all you’re talking about.
That’s all it takes.
Once a week.
If we do this once a week and this is our 10,000 hours.
We’ll get good someday.
Okay.
So you’re discounting all the work that I put in between.
All the review of it.
Yeah.
You’ve got five more hours.
So each episode we invest 10 hours into, let’s say.
Yeah.
And then you’ve got all of the research, all of the reading that you do that helps and
all of the podcasts and videos that I…
That’s 520 a year.
10,000 divided by 5.
20 is 20 years.
Yeah.
Okay.
That’s much more reasonable.
I like that.
Okay.
Instead of 200.
In 20 years, we’ll be experts at this.
We’ll have mastered the podcast.
Right.
Right.
And then we can move on to something else after 20 years.
And who’s been doing podcasting for 20 years?
How long has Joe Rogan been a podcaster?
Not very long.
Adam Carolla, I think, is one of the first that I recall.
Gosh, when did he start?
I don’t see that.
Radio shows is where it kind of started.
Everything started with radio shows.
So Joe Rogan started recording in 09.
Jordan Peterson started recording in the 80s.
He’s got stuff in there from the 80s.
He’s been working on that for…
Yeah.
Those are his recordings of his lectures, right?
College lectures.
Yeah.
And it’s interesting.
His early college lectures sounds exactly the same as he does now.
He’s talking about exactly the same things.
He’s been on the same avenue for 40 years.
Joe Rogan from 2009.
So what is that?
15 years?
15 years.
Yeah.
He’s almost perfect.
Well, they say he’s got 6,500 hours of podcast runtime.
That’s what the model says here.
6,500 hours of recorded time.
And if you count, we’re 10xing that for hours.
He’s put 65,000 hours into this.
He’s six times competent at what he’s doing.
Are we to the summary part yet?
The key points of this, we should all be reaching for competency.
Is there objectively anything that everyone needs to be competent in?
And I know that answer will vary depending on your political affiliation or your religious
affiliation.
So objectively is what I’m looking for.
Diversity, inclusion, and equity.
If you include those type things that hopefully are dying out, if they die out, that’s good.
If they don’t, you still have to include people.
But in regard to that, competence.
In a self-centered way, perhaps everyone needs to be competent in being happy, right?
They’d be happier if they were.
They would be.
But the world would be a better place.
If people were less upset about things, kind of though, because you have to be upset about
something to want to change something.
We’ve talked about that.
In a fleeting thing like a leaf floating down the river, you’ve got to recognize the upset,
but you don’t have to wallow in it.
You don’t have to sit in it.
You don’t have to stay upset.
There are people who stay upset and they live in a miserable life and they’re in misery
the whole time because they’re just upset all the time.
So that’s not a competent.
Maybe they’re competent in being upset.
Is that a valid way to live?
Yeah, well, and if you’re upset and you’re a victim, then that’s the worst way because
you’re just upset about everything and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, nothing you
can do about it.
My life is out of my control, you know?
But if you’re upset and you recognize that you have the power to make things different,
you’re not a victim, then you change it and you become happy.
I think for social change to happen, like Martin Luther King, he had to be upset about
something long enough that he wanted to do something.
Martin Luther King Jr., yeah, he wanted to make a change.
He had to be upset about it long enough that he started that whole thing.
Well, he participated in the civil rights movement and promoted it and pushed it and
encouraged it.
Yeah, he couldn’t see the thing he was mad about and then just be like, well, that’s
life.
I’m gonna be happy no matter what, you know?
And he probably was happy no matter what, but he did have a passion to work for.
So you have a passion to work for, like accepting mediocrity.
He probably accepted the fact that people weren’t listening to him or that they were
throwing rocks at him or whatever.
You accept that and you have to move on or that the dogs were sicced on him.
I don’t know, whatever.
Yeah.
That you still have to move forward in your passionate venture.
I mean, what you’re after, what you’re trying to accomplish, unless you’re not trying to
accomplish anything.
And that’s, we were talking to those people that are skating or floating through life
and just not trying to accomplish anything.
They don’t have to be happy.
So you ask the question kind of what are we obligated to do?
What should we all do?
What should everyone do?
So what’s our obligation?
The Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal with certain inalienable
rights.
So do we have to operate within those rights?
Is that our requirement?
Are we required to pay attention to the rights of others to live so that they, you know,
for other people, so you’re not infringing on someone else’s rights?
Yes.
Yeah.
So you have to be competent enough to know what those rights are.
Maybe that’s it.
Yeah.
So you have to be that competent in the rights that you have and recognizing that everyone
else also has those rights.
Right.
And that you’re not going to infringe on the rights of others.
Being aware enough, and that’s part of society operating appropriately is you can’t have
someone going along just killing people because they feel like it.
You know, it’s just, I have a sword.
I’m going to use it.
So in addition to competency, you have to also believe that the rights are rights and
not just some law that somebody made up.
Not just myths.
Not just mythology.
Yeah.
That there are inalienable rights, unalienable rights, inalienable rights that can’t be separated
from people.
And that’s just one document that said it that way and said what it is.
Yeah, I brought that up.
That was one thing that Adler said in his book in regard to what reading.
Starting with paragraph three of the Declaration of Independence, it says, these are the reasons
why we feel like we need to do this.
And it says the next eight paragraphs all the way to the end, including the part that
say, to this we pledge our sacred honor.
You know, that’s the phrase.
It’s kind of a trite phrase at the end.
But all of that, he says, doesn’t really deserve to be read.
It’s elementary reading is all it is.
You’re just maybe listing out the points.
But the first two paragraphs, all men are created equal, inalienable rights, pursuit
of happiness.
There’s topics in there.
There’s points in there that need a lifetime of discussion, most likely.
Said that you need to really dig into and understand.
The first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are where its meat is.
That’s what you read.
So it’s not that you understand everything about the document, but you understand stuff
about the first part.
The Federalist Papers are just letters that led up to the independence of the country,
right?
Yeah, creating the Constitution of the United States.
So that’s what the Federalist Papers are, promoting how to develop the Constitution,
whether it would be what it was under the Articles of Confederation, a confederacy,
or a country with a constitution, I guess.
Democracy.
Yeah.
A democracy, then a republic, and not a monarchy.
It was the discussion promoting the Constitution.
And it was just the conversation.
It was held in public.
So that’s higher than fourth grade reading.
That’s like 10th grader, college level writing, because they’re writing on their scale.
On their level, yeah.
And they’re not trying to dumb it down for everyone to read, but it was put in the papers
for everyone to read.
So maybe they were more literate.
The people reading papers were more literate in that day.
Or maybe nobody read it.
They looked at it and they’re like, ah, this is not for me.
Good thing those people are doing that, because I’m not going to care.
I don’t care what George Hamilton’s doing or Madison.
Yeah.
But that’s…
Yeah, and it’s hard to understand their writings, like any of the philosophers, Marcus Aurelius
and Emerson, their writings are complicated.
They use some words you don’t know that are new and different.
But even if they’re not using words that you don’t understand, they’re phrasing it in ways
that you have to think about it to get the meaning out of it.
Common hours.
But the more that you read difficult literature, the better you’ll get at understanding it
and it won’t be difficult anymore.
It’ll be for you easy, easy to understand.
You could probably read through it as fast as you read through Dogman and understand
what they’re talking about, because you have the context.
The more you read, the more you know, right?
And you can understand the context of how they’re writing it.
So you find out if you enter a paragraph and you’re lost from the first sentences, first
words in the paragraph, there’s no way you’re going to understand anything in the paragraph.
But if you can get the direction that the writer’s going and you can identify what the
context is that he’s talking about, then you can see the points as it’s rolling through.
You can’t just read words and with your mind, and that’s one thing he talks about too, is
reading isn’t how fast you read the words.
It’s how your mind works.
Your mind has to be there.
That’s why he talks about active and directive, active and, on the other word, demanding.
Demanding reading.
You’re demanding the attention of your mind.
It takes full attention in order to really read.
You can’t read while you’re listening to the TV or something else.
Reading needs to be where your mind is.
If your mind’s in it, then you’ll comprehend as you’re reading through the paragraph and
you won’t get lost.
You won’t daydream.
You won’t float off here or there because that’s where you’re focused.
You’re focused on that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So your comprehension level needs to be higher, but the way to do that is to focus in.
Like how people say, back to a religious topic, you read the scriptures every day.
Read the Bible every day or the scriptures, the Book of Mormon.
Every day you’re going to get into the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita, whatever you read.
If you’re just reading the words, people is, you want to read the Book of Mormon every
day, at least read a verse.
But if you’re just reading words on the verse, it doesn’t mean a thing to you.
You got nothing out of it.
You didn’t think about it.
You didn’t comprehend it.
You didn’t contemplate it.
If you didn’t spend any time with it, so you picked it up and read it.
That got you to an elementary step on it.
You read some words, but unless you internalize it or go to an analytical standpoint of saying,
what did it say?
Is it true?
Is what I read accurate?
And what does it mean to me?
What does it mean to the world?
What does it mean anywhere?
You got to ask those questions.
What does it mean?
That reading versus studying, right?
Yeah.
And you study and you don’t need to study a whole lot.
I mean, you can study five words or one word.
You can study competence.
That’s plenty of reading to understand.
Everything that competence implies.
I mean, that question, we’ve been talking about, what does it imply?
It implies more than you can talk about.
It’s more than 400 words.
400 pages of a book you could write.
Competence implies a whole lot.
Yeah.
And imply is a subjective word.
It could mean more to one person than it could mean to another based on their competency.
Right.
Or based on their desires or what they want.
I mean, someone who’s floating through life doesn’t care what competence implies.
It doesn’t imply anything to me.
Yeah.
I’m okay being average.
I’m average.
I don’t want to think about…
As long as no one accuses them of being incompetent.
Yeah.
And go ahead.
I’m an idiot.
They’ll be happy to be idiots.
I’m an average idiot.
The village idiot.
And don’t ask me how to spell it.
I’m not going to spell anything that’s beyond me.
Those people who go to school spell things.
I might even say the word wrong.
And they don’t care if they say the word wrong or right or anything.
Yeah.
So, we should gain in competence.
Everyone should.
Well, and I think really everyone does in the avenues that they’re happy doing so.
It’s where you set your goals and your desires and your focus, what you’re going to work
on next.
Right.
Right.
So, what are you right now gaining competency in besides vibrato on the violin?
Vibrato on the violin.
Well, yeah, that’s one of those things I looked at once in the last…
Probably in four years, I’ve thought of it once recently.
Okay.
So, that’s why I brought it up.
Huh.
Everything.
Everything.
Everything.
You can’t just pick one because it’s everything.
Your whole life is competency.
Well, in my mind, I’ve got a Christmas gift that I was identified to…
And I believe I’m going to have to create something.
For our Secret Santa exchange?
Yeah.
I’m going to have to weld something.
So I’m…
Okay.
I’m thinking on welding something together.
Do you know how to weld?
I’ve got a welder and I’ve done it before.
Step one, acquire the welder.
So there we go.
I’ve got a level of competence with that.
I can make it…
I don’t know that I can make it look pretty, but it doesn’t need to look pretty.
It’s going to be a welded gift.
Okay.
Okay.
So I think it will work and that’s…
So that’s what I’m working on.
To get that level, first I’ve got to find the items to weld together and then figure
out how to weld them together.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I think it’ll be cool.
Okay.
Based on my information, I believe it will be appreciated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That survey has been really helpful for me too, choosing a gift for my secret child.
Yeah.
So I got to have to find out…
Yeah.
We’ve got the information that we have.
So that’s one thing I’m going to work on competence on is seeing if I can get the machine to run
and weld at least enough to put something together.
And then I’m considering whether I want to paint it or things that you got to do.
I’ve got spray paint.
Got all kinds of spray paint.
I could spray paint it.
Yeah.
As long as you don’t care what color it is.
Right.
I could probably even find the color I want it to be.
Let’s see.
What other competencies?
Like reading.
I am gaining a lot in reading right now.
Speed reading courses.
I mean, I’ve thought about speed reading for a long time, trying to figure out what that
is, how you do that.
And the comprehension is important.
But from what he says with this, you can read words fast, you can speed read, and he’s got
the trick of doing it.
You make your eye go faster, your brain will catch up.
If you make your eye go faster across the page, your brain will catch up and then you’ll
gain a competency in that speed of reading through.
And it’s important maybe to do that if you’re scanning.
That’s what I had this one guy I was talking to that was a speed reader.
He’d read, I don’t know, a thousand pages an hour.
And he would go through it because he knew what he was looking for and he could scan
the whole page.
He didn’t voice anything.
He scanned the whole page and saw it.
He saw everything on the page and he was looking for specific things.
So he said, when I’m doing that, when I’m proofreading, I can look for specific things
and it’s easy.
I can run that through and he’s very accurate with it.
Yeah.
Because you know what you’re looking for.
So you can get your reading to be that fast, to be really fast.
But that’s not good reading.
That’s not how to read.
You’ve got to be able to slow down and analyze when it’s time to analyze and then take all
of the time you need to go back through that sentence again and again and make sure that
you understand the connection between that sentence and the one before the paragraph.
And you’re thinking about it.
You’re engaging, you’re thinking, your brain and that’s reading.
Right.
That’s reading.
So I’m learning all of that.
And syntopical, that’s what I love about reading.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve always learned about reading is connecting it to the next work,
putting these two things together.
Right.
Yeah.
But you feel like increasing competence in everything you do.
Let me ask it this way.
Is there anything that you are doing that you don’t want to increase your competence
at?
Yes.
Loading the dishwasher.
I have mastered that.
So I am not going to get any better at that.
I’m not looking for any information on how to load the dishwasher better.
That’s where it’s at.
I know that I’m doing it the best way possible.
So it’s black and white.
You got to a point that you know that there’s nothing else.
Right.
Your way is the right way.
Every other way is wrong.
No, I wasn’t raised that way.
I did have to work to get to know.
Yeah, you got to the point where you got…
So you get to your level of competence.
Yeah.
And now if I tell you that all the dishes have to be facing the center, is that the
way you do it?
Nope.
No.
So if I tell you that and say that’s the best way that dishwashers work is everything has
to face the center.
Right.
What does that mean to you?
That means you’re wrong.
That’s not…
You’re wrong.
Well, because the way the dishwasher is built, it’s built to throw water from all directions
as long as the dishes are facing down.
So you have a justification for the way you’re doing it.
Yeah, well, of course I do.
That’s…
Justifying it.
You have a justification for the way you do your things too.
All right.
No, I believe that you would still make an adjustment on the way you do the dishwasher.
You think that you’re at the apex of your dishwasher life.
But I bet if we talk in two years, if we still know each other in two years, you will have
changed something.
You will have changed something in your dishwasher loading characteristics.
Okay.
So let me ask you, how do you face drinking glasses towards the center?
How do you do that?
Do you lay them all down on its side?
No, no.
I think facing down is more important than facing to the center.
We face all of our plates to one side as long as they’re all facing the same direction.
Because if they’re faced to each other, then they kind of close up and…
Okay, like bowls.
The water can’t flow.
And silverware can go up or down.
It doesn’t matter, but I prefer up so that I can see before I pull it out whether it’s
clean or not, whether it got clean or not.
So that’s the best way is up.
Knives you have to place down, right?
Sharp knives, but I don’t put sharp knives in the dishwasher because the dishwasher is
too abrasive for the sharp edge.
So I hand wash the sharp knives, the butter knives face up.
Okay, see?
You got peculiarities in that.
I know, I know.
I don’t think that I will change my dishwashing strategy to not include sharp knives.
I’m going to let them just be washed in the dishwasher.
That’s fine.
That’s fine.
So seriously though, is there anything that really matters in life that I am fine with
my competency level in?
Is that really your question?
Yeah, is there anything you can imagine that you wouldn’t want?
Even serious, not serious.
Okay.
If you had the chance to increase your competency, you would not take it.
Hmm, no.
I think if I had the chance, the opportunity to increase competency in anything, I probably
would take it, except exercise.
Don’t want…
Exercise.
Just kidding, just kidding.
Probably, probably, probably if I had the chance and it was easy enough, then I would
increase my competency in exercising, but it’s not easy enough yet.
It’s okay, and competence and the choice to increase competence has to deal with focus.
You can’t focus on very many things at a time.
We talked about you’re doing a lot of things during a day and you’re gaining 10,000 hours
worth of competency in quite a number of things, 20 or 40 things, but you can’t do that in
5,000 things.
You’ve got a limit of what you can actually focus on.
That’s why I haven’t picked up a violin for four or five years, because it’s just not
that thing that I can focus on right now.
There’s no reason for me to focus on that competence.
I thought about it the other day and I know that I can still pick up a pen and do the
practice that she told me is what you do.
What do they teach kids to start learning that vibrato?
So I can do that with a pen.
I’ll still do that for a number of years, but it may be four or five more years before
I pick up a violin, just because my focus doesn’t say that’s the primary thing.
That’s not your priority.
That’s not your one out of 25 things.
Yeah.
So it’s the 25.
It’s part of that 25, the 20 that I’m going to ignore completely, not even think about.
That little thing we talked about, spinning a pen around your thumb, I probably will not
work on that.
It’s not something that I really want to do.
So really, it all comes down to what your priorities are.
Yeah.
If I were sitting in a convention that I had to sit for two hours on this lecture or whatever,
and I was just sitting there and I had my pen, I might practice it.
I might try to figure out how to get that to spin around or twirl a pen.
I imagine that’s where people learned it is they were sitting in boring lectures.
Yeah.
Or public school classes.
Public school class, yeah.
Or like learning how to juggle.
That’d be something we could gain more competence in.
But where’s the focus on that?
When should it be done?
I don’t know.
When should you learn how to juggle?
Right.
If, let’s see, when would I learn how to juggle?
If I entered a game show competition where I knew I was good at one thing that you had
to do, but then also I had to learn how to be good at juggling too, then I probably would…
I know I can learn how to juggle.
I can’t juggle yet, but I know I can if I practiced enough.
And what would bring it to the focus?
What would bring that into your focus so that you could ignore other things and focus on
that?
That’s what you talk about.
That’s where you’re going to build your competence is in that thing that you can bring to your
focus.
Yeah.
It’s potential that one of your children will require you to bring that focus together.
That could happen.
Yeah.
To learn how to juggle.
Let’s say they said, I want to know how to juggle.
And I saw this and we got to do this.
You would do it with them.
I bet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a friend whose husband became a black belt in karate because his son wanted to do
that.
Wanted to do karate.
Yeah.
He had no desire to do it before his son was like, I’m going to do karate.
And so they did it together and he became a black belt.
Right.
Right.
And you’re invited by someone that it’s in your primary circle of people.
You’re tier one or some close friend, someone you want to maintain a relationship, a close
relationship with, you’ll do it with them if they have the idea.
And it will become your idea.
Like you were talking about, if someone wants you to change and wants you to learn how to
juggle or via black belt karate, you’re not going to do it because they want to do it.
But you’re going to get yourself to want to do it.
That’s when you’re going to do it.
It’s when you want to do it.
And you bring your focus to that level.
So that’s the summary, I think, of competence that I want to end on.
You can become competent in anything that you’re willing to take focus on.
You’re going to be happy focusing on long enough to do it.
Yeah.
No matter what your mental capacities are.
Right.
Like even if you were born with limited capacity, there are maybe your competency level may be
less than someone else, but you still can become competent to a certain degree.
More competent.
More competent than you are now.
Someone like, well, Stephen Hawking famously, who kept his brain active, though he couldn’t
move his body after he was like 20 when he developed that disease.
So he developed whatever the disease was that took him down, but he stayed preeminent on
the world, a highly competent individual writing books and everything.
And he advanced, he continued to advance, but he didn’t advance physically because he
was limited in that.
He was retarded in the physical capacity.
But that didn’t stop his competence in every other area of life, living.
Right.
Right.
In everything that he put his focus toward.
Yeah.
Everything he could still do.
And maybe he even gained some competence from the time that, you know, the ability to use
the materials around him to communicate.
Certainly he, I don’t know what he developed.
He might’ve developed some of the things that are used for communication for someone in
that status.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Possible.
You got someone like Dennis Prager.
Do you hear what’s happening to him right now?
No.
That he fell in the shower.
I just found out it was in the shower a while ago, about two weeks ago.
He fell in the shower and cracked his head, cracked his neck.
And so it’s, he had to be on a breathing tube for a while.
He wasn’t able to do anything.
He’s still in the hospital.
Two weeks later, he’s not, it’s going to be a long recovery, they say.
If he gets back his full capacities, they’re not sure that he’s going to get everything
back.
But his brain is fully there.
So everyone, people who have talked with him say he’s fully, fully coherent.
He’s aware of everything.
And his family, his office has been talking about what’s going on with him.
Yeah.
Who is this guy?
I don’t know who Dennis Prager is.
Who’s Dennis Prager?
Dennis Prager is.
Prager University, he is, I know he’s part of the Jordan Peterson’s crew, not crew, but
contemporary.
His colleagues.
Okay.
His colleagues, as far as that intelligent level.
He’s very well known in the conservative arenas, I guess.
Someone on your liberal side, you may not ever hear about him.
I’m too skeptical to know about him.
Yeah.
But, I mean, that’s a change, but developing competence back.
Maybe he’ll have the competence again to walk.
And he did just start talking.
It was probably a few days ago, they said he voiced his first words again, but his brain
is fully there, he’s comprehending everything that’s going on.
So it’s just his body has to get back to work again through his neck, through the spinal
cord injury, whatever it was that created the disconnect.
It’s got to heal.
And it may take a while and it may not completely come back.
Like Christopher Reeves we talked about, who didn’t get anything back.
But his brain was still there.
Christopher Reeves still operated.
Yeah.
Well, this was a very interesting conversation.
And I’m glad that you wrote that word down so that we could talk about it.
One word, we got to competence.
So choose what you focus on and competence, develop competence where you focus.
And I think everything we do every day has to be for that purpose of increasing competence.
There’s no reason to do something to try to lose competence.
You want to increase competence in everything you do.
Okay.
Very good.
Do you know what we’re planning on talking about next week?
Dualism.
Dualism.
Black and white, is that what dualism is?
And maybe it’s dualism in relation to the three body problem.
Okay.
I’ll need to do some research on that.
Dualism and why dualism exists.
And that’s just the continuum.
Everything exists on a continuum.
Black and white, left and right, up, down.
That will be a very interesting conversation too, I think.
So we start with dualism.
Now that came from a brother that we may, I don’t know, that he’ll want to be invited
in or not.
Yeah.
Maybe we can have him come anyway.
So we’ll see.
I’ll talk with him again.
Okay.
I’ve got to go.
I’m out of time.
Okay.
You got to go.
Thank you for talking.
We’ll see you.
Bye.
Bye.
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